Staring at Strangers
by FancyFreeThinker101
Summary: In which Edward is certain that Bella is an alien. AU, No Vampires. May be M later. Edward/Bella. All reviews will be replied to.
1. Chapter 1

_AN: Whoa. Never thought I'd be doing this. Well, I had this odd little idea that wouldn't go away, so here it is! Please please review; I won't know I'm doing or how it is without your feedback. This will be a multichapter fic. It's completely AU._

_Prologue_

He likes to sit when he's alone and toy with the piano.

He doesn't like to make music, per se, but he likes to pretend. He likes to roll the velvety keys under his fingers and close his eyes and inhale the day, the moment, the window, the weather.

He likes to listen to the tuneless tinkling, the lovely discordant notes going high and low and low and high without rhyme or reason.

He likes to sit there and live.

* * *

His name is Edward Cullen and his mother worries because he's a little bit strange.

He knows she does. Esme is as billowing and transparent as autumn and she watches him more than she does the others. More than Emmett, lounging and large and careless, the boy-man who's in shameless love with his girlfriend.

More than Alice, elfin and quick and uncanny, carving out tiny little niches and saying bright, bewildering, enchanting things to strangers on the street.

More than Carlisle, his father, golden and serene and quietly, unassumingly brilliant.

She watches him, he knows, because though they are a family of slightly peculiar people, they're all peculiar in that charming, odd way happy people are, and his peculiarity is more of the pensive dreamer sort.

His name is Edward Cullen, and his mother also worries because he's a little bit sad.

* * *

He has a theory that there are other worlds out there.

Not in the sterilized, soap-opera style of little green men in cold, whirling silver discs or living on red, dusty planets—he's either too skeptical for that, or not enough. He believes, actually, that there are just—Beings.

He's not quite sure what differentiates a Being from a fresh-from-the-press human, only that there's something of the Strange in these Beings. There's an Aura about them, an aura of freshness, of something more than simply peculiar.

He believes this—and what's more, he's determined to prove it. He has a journal, stuffed with errant theories and wonderings and empty data tables which he hopes will one day be full. This is, of course, another reason that Esme—she prefers it to Mom or Mother—looks at him with that line at the inner edge of her eyebrow…

He sighs.

It's not that he blames her, of course. It's quite natural. After all, Emmett and Alice might be strange, whispers might linger in their wakes, but neither of them had had extraterrestrial—if you could call it that; personally he hates the word—obsessions…and maintained them at the age of seventeen. Neither of them stared out of windows for nearly an hour, trying to detect even the slightest hint of unearthliness in the dirt-dull passerby…

But he does, and he thinks to himself with a slightly grim smile that one day, when an alternate life form is discovered, his efforts will be vindicated. What was it that Swift had said about genius and a confederacy of dunces? Surely that applied to all of his schoolmates who insist on giving him a very wide berth…not to mention the ones who snicker as he goes by…

He shakes himself and comes away from the window. Futile to think of that now. He checks his watch and, discovering that it's just about time for breakfast, makes his way into the dining room. The rest are already there; there's Carlisle, talking quietly to Esme quite as if Emmett wasn't recounting some loud, lewd limerick for a tolerantly smiling Alice's benefit. He slips into his empty place and reaches for the cereal.

At once, Esme is looking at him, a question—oh, God, a _favor_ in her large hazel eyes.

He resists the urge to groan aloud; Esme's "favors" are always connected to long hours spent cleaning the houses and cars of elderly shut ins or making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches till his hands hurt for the people who live under the bridge.

It isn't that he _minds_ doing that, per se…but he has plans for today, has counted on being able to flesh out a couple of his theories...

But Esme has that light of neighborly charity in her eyes, and God help the person who tries to stop her.

"Edward," she says in her soft, piano voice, while he grits his teeth and prepares for another long venture in Loving Thy Neighbor. "Edward, dear, do you think you could do me a favor?"

The magic word is said, the pin is out of the grenade. Emmett stops mid-guffaw and turns to him with the beginnings of a smirk on his face. Alice watches him try to look enthusiastic with a mixture of laughter and sympathy in her wide, wide eyes.

Really. If Esme weren't so damn _nice_, the whole situation would be so much easier.

"S-sure, Esme," he says, the picture of filial resignation. Carlisle, looking up from his toast, hides a smile.

"What is it?"

She smiles that wide, warm _oh, thank you so much _smile that none of them can resist and continues quietly:

"Well, I saw that nice policeman in the post office the other day, and he told me that his daughter has come to town and is having problems in trigonometry. Edward, you're so good at trig, and you like it so, I couldn't help but volunteer you as a tutor…is that alright? It would only be for an hour every Saturday. If you'd rather not, of course I can tell him that…"

Of course he'd rather not. That goes without saying. Teaching some stranger how to navigate her way through the terrors of sine and cosine is hardly his idea of an hour well spent. But to tell Esme that is entirely out of the question.

So much for a day of peaceful, scientific solitude.

He sighs.

"That sounds fine. When does this start?"

The _thank you_ smile gets wider and warmer as she murmurs "thank you, sweetheart" and informs him that the policeman had said, if it was alright, that he'd like to start next week.

He sighs again—a more resigned one now—and says that that will be fine. His mother looks at him like he's discovering the cure for cancer.

"You're a good boy, Edward."

He shrugs. He knows he is—theoretically, anyway. They're all good; it runs in the family.

Abruptly, Emmett changes the subject.

"Mom, Rose is coming to dinner, that okay?"

Rose is Emmett's lovely, haughty, golden girlfriend. She's tall and striking and there's something about her which smacks of a queen—but all that being said, he can't say he's terribly impressed with his brother's taste. Rose—an affectionate shortening of Rosalie, which he thinks is rather a stupid name—is simply one of those girls for whom the word _prickly_ is tailor made.

He thinks he can detect a hint of his own distaste on Alice's fine features, but it passes and she only looks alert and chirping, a bird ready for the next flight.

He suspects that, when it comes to things like this, Alice is an immeasurably better sport than he is.

Carlisle gives the reply; the question would have been better directed toward him anyway. Esme loves company, the more the merrier, and the happiness of her oldest son in the company of his thorny betrothed delights her beyond imagining.

"Of course. It's always a pleasure to see Rose. Has she found a decent apartment?"

Rosalie is attending the state college a few hours away and searching for decent living quarters. Edward suspects that both she and Emmett have ulterior, sexual motives in this clamor for, as Rose phrases it, "an independent space"…but it's only conjecture and his mind prefers not to dwell on the utterly scarring images such conjecture conjures.

"Nah, still looking," shrugs Emmett, leaning back with a big, faraway grin on his open, handsome face. "She'll find it, though. Rose knows how to get what she wants." And he chuckles almost proudly, as if this were some endearing or even laudable achievement on her part.

He—Edward—just rolls his eyes. His brother has always been one of unusual tastes.

* * *

He's out for a trip to the library when it happens.

He's carefully combing through said library's rather meagre stock of decent books on life in space, looking for one which he hasn't read over and over, when he hears a thump and a muffled expletive from the other side of the shelves.

Mildly curious and not averse to a silent chuckle at a stranger's expense, he pushes some of the books aside and peeks through the chink.

And abruptly he's having trouble breathing correctly because his heart is slamming persistently against his throat.

On the other side of the shelves is a girl—perhaps seventeen. She's all softened angles and long brown hair as she nurses a bumped elbow; from his rather unusual vantage point, he can see the wide, annoyed brown eyes and pointed chin.

She's as typical as bread and butter, but his mind is buzzing and his hands are scrabbling eagerly for a notebook because he's quite certain he's just stumbled upon a Being.


	2. Chapter 2

_AN: Hi! Er, not gotten any feedback yet, so I'm begging you, please please give me something! It would make my day! Also, thanks so much to Alexa Twilight for favoriting and following!_

_Note: This is a light, just-for-fun, comedy-of-errors sort of story. More will come._

He knows what she is, though he doesn't know why.

Why he knows, that is. He never troubles himself with metaphysical musings as to why the Beings exist.

He's not sure, exactly, what it is about her that sets her apart. She is not fantastically lovely; she scrapes just this side of being pretty, actually. He would describe her more as _pleasant-looking_; her prettiness consists of a lack of discord in her features, a lack of anything very striking or angry. She seems soft and pale and harmless.

So it's not beauty, then, that these Beings have.

In the back of his mind, he concludes that it makes sense. If the Beings were to traipse about looking like Rosalie, they'd be discovered in a few years, tops. Inconspicuousness is key.

Is there something else about her, something that merits her otherworldly status?

Still flat against the bookshelf, he has to reply in the negative.

Nothing. There's nothing about her. She's of average height and rather slender. She has brown hair and wears a sweater and jeans.

She's a fucking poster child for anonymity.

The Beings are more clever than he's given them credit for.

And yet…

He's certain that there is _something_ about her.

Some aura he's always half-consciously connected with them, some newness. Some glaring atypical _something_. And in a sense, she has it. He doesn't quite know what it is, but something about her is _fresh_ and exciting.

He peels himself off of the bookshelf, chastising himself for wasting so much time when he could have been interacting with a Being first hand.

Without stopping to think or plan or consider, he walks around to the other side of the shelf and smiles at her.

"Hi."

She stops, and he wonders what's going through her mind. Does she see that look on his face? Does she know she's been discovered?

Her cheeks burn. He itches to whip out his notebook and mark down that the Beings' circulatory systems thus far appear to work just as well as that of humans.

"Uh…hey."

"Can I help you with something?" he says, because it's the first thing that comes to mind. Of course, he must play it cool, as his peers would say, he must pretend it's all well and good and that he's just a slightly socially awkward, devastatingly handsome—he finds that positive thinking is always a plus—teenager who's aching to help someone in need.

She's looking at him like he's batshit. He decides that her pretense of normality is laudably life-like.

"Do you—um—work here?"

"Yes," he lies, though in truth he'd kill himself if he had to stay cooped up in this tiny, poorly stocked haven of romance novels and man-hating, middle aged librarians.

"Oh," she says, and her eyes wander up and down him for a moment as if remarking he's not the norm for a library employee.

"I'm the token male," he says, hoping the Beings can at least simulate some sense of humor.

They can. She smiles uncertainly.

Astounding.

"Oh."

"So, is there any way I can help you?"

She shrugs, almost hunching in on herself.

"I mean…I guess. I'm uh, looking for a book."

"As are many people within libraries," he says, before he can stop himself. He thinks of it as the Nervous Snark Syndrome. "It's a chronic condition."

The Being looks at him again; he wonders if they have been—programmed? Trained?—about sarcasm.

She blushes again. The question remains inconclusive.

"Yeah—well—I'm looking for a book about the psychology of Hitler."

"Sure," he finds himself breathing, forgetting for the moment that he's a library employee now in the frenzy of committing to memory the fact that the Beings appear to have a taste for intellectual pursuits.

Her eyebrows ascend. She really mimics a human remarkably well.

"Do you—know if they have that here?"

"Of course I do," he says. Lies, he decides, are apparently an inseparable part of scientific pursuits.

She makes a wide, sweeping gesture with her deceptively unremarkable hands.

"Well, do they?"

"No," he says, because to be quite blunt the psychology of Hitler was never his area of interest and he has no idea where on earth books on it would be found. "No, uh—just out."

"Out?" The Being's tone drips with stunning disbelief; again, he marvels at her ability to reproduce human nuances and emotions. Again, he swears inwardly at his frustrating lack of notebook.

The importance of noting these particulars down at once, before they can be distorted by the subjectivity of his mind, cannot be stressed enough.

"It's—it's a popular topic."

"What? That doesn't—"

"May I help you, dear?"

A librarian materializes, oozing misandry and general disapproval. Sensing that his thicket of lies may well be coming to entangle him, he leaves, hurrying home and barricading himself in his room.

He has a rather exciting feeling that his life's purpose is finally on its way to some fulfillment.

* * *

It began when he was eight.

He was always a quiet, solitary sort; he didn't have Emmett's startling physique or bluff, open manners or Alice's charming, alluringly pixie-like ways. He read too much and spoke too little and even then used to sit there and play jumbles of random notes on the piano, tracing harmonies in their chaos.

He imagined that there was something godly in that, and it thrilled him.

The world intrigued him; he had an inquiring mind, and he wanted to know.

Fantasy, the typical refuge of the young mind, was the first shot; he tried investigating the possible existence of witches and brownies and vampires.

But he didn't believe in them either, so the question was settled before it was even posed, and he soon renounced fairy tale creatures. From the shadows of Myth he crossed the threshold into the glaring lights of Fact, searching old periodicals and dull, condescending textbooks for something Unknown. Something fresh. Something he could Find.

* * *

Shortly before his ninth birthday, he found it.

_"Dad?"_

_Carlisle, lounged on the sofa and exuding tranquility, smiled at him._

_"Yes, Edward?"_

_They had finished watching ET, and he was torn between being skeptical that ET would go the same way as the witches and leprechauns and hopeful that maybe this was something new and untrodden._

_He pointed to the dim, flickering screen._

_"Are they—are they REAL?"_

_Carlisle frowned thoughtfully, running a hand through his hair._

_"You know, Edward, I'm not sure. Scientists have been working on that one. Sometimes they say no, sometimes they say probably. No one will ever really know for sure."_

_There was something thumping in his ears and his wrists, and he ran off to his room without offering an explanation._

_That night, he was digging through old scientific magazines until 3 AM._

* * *

Of course, Esme had little appreciation for science.

"Edward? Edward, dear, your student's coming in a moment, come out of there."

He frowns; he's in the midst of poring for the dozenth time over all the details he'd painstakingly copied the moment he arrived home last week from the library.

Promise to Esme aside, to be interrupted in the study of Beings for a mere, mathematically challenged human is nothing short of infuriating.

But Esme is Esme, all caramel curls and large, innocent eyes, and he closes his notebook and complies.

There's a knock at the door, and amidst the babble of Esme being motherly and welcoming and the police chief—who sounds, to him, extremely awkward and perhaps rather stupid—being gruff and blunt, he hears something.

A quiet, mumbling voice, laced with something of the father's awkwardness, excruciatingly familiar—which, before he can quite process the explosion that's taking place inside his head, is followed by Her.

The bread and butter girl with the pulsing, invigorating aura and wide, brown eyes.

She's a little startled when she sees him, and he detects a strengthened unease on her heart-shaped face as she shuffles toward him with that hunched-shoulder gait and dangles for his inspection a soft, inoffensive hand.

"Hey, I'm Bella Swan," she says, in the quick, stammering way of an orator reading his speech on blurry flashcards. "I-I guess you'll be teaching me trig."

As his jaw (metaphorically, of course) brushes the polished wooden floors and his head buzzes at this new information, trying to put the _when _and the _why_, the _motive_, all in place, he guesses he will.


	3. Chapter 3

They go into his room and neither of them speak.

She, the cunningly typical little minx, clears her throat a little and looks around at his walls (a sensible pale blue with the occasional poster of Einstein or Watson and Crick), gnawing at her lip.

Her trig book is tucked under her arm and her shoulders are still shoved inward. He wonders if it's her way to communicate fear or awkwardness.

He decides that, given the circumstances, it might be both.

"So," he says, torn between the fact that he's no hand at talking to girls and the rather more pressing aspect that said 'girl' is actually a being from space, "uh…let's get started."

"Yeah."

She plunks down in the extra chair Esme has set up beside his desk. Her hair falls gracelessly forward into her face.

She sits there like that for several minutes. It takes him a second to grasp that _ohhh_, she's waiting for him to begin.

Mentally, he decides to mark _crippling social awkwardness_ in his notebook as a trait of the Beings.

"So, what do you need help with?" he says, sliding into a seat beside her, surreptitiously looking over her for some mark, some sign of her otherworldly birth.

One of her shoulders twitches.

"I dunno—a-all of it, I guess."

He nods. So does she. Her cheeks burn.

"Is math a problem, or is it just trig?" He tries to phrase it tactfully, to keep it as far away from _do you suck at sine and cosine, or math in general_ as possible. She looks now as if she wants to smile; he's both glad to see it and relieved that she's capable.

He was starting to wonder if the Beings were unfamiliar with the concept.

"I find mathematics problematic as a general rule," she says, suddenly astoundingly coherent, given her prior, mumbled _yeahs_ and _I guesses_. "Though trigonometry in particular…I find it liked only among those with chronic intestinal distress."

He coughs, delighted and shocked again with this glimmering of humor from this odd, awkward alien.

"I see you speak in complete sentences now," he remarks before he can stop himself. He gives a brief prayer of thanks to the Higher Power that Be that Emmett isn't around to hear this; his suavity with the ladies has never been his strong suit.

But she laughs—a low, pleasant sound which is remarkably well-simulated.

"Well, I decided a moment ago you're just as much of a nerd as I am, so I needn't freeze you with my conversational ineptitude. Normal people disconcert me."

"Really? What's your brand of nerdery?" he inquires, finding himself genuinely curious. The open trigonometry book lies momentarily forgotten.

"I gravitate towards history and psychology."

"Right," he says, recalling the Day of 1,000 Lies last week. "You're a Fuhrer fangirl, am I correct?"

It occurs to him directly after he says this that it's rather a tasteless remark to make to a female who has just made his acquaintance; surely the Beings are well-versed in rudimentary politeness and the slippery slopes of political correctness.

"I enjoy the tangle of thorns that encompasses his psyche, if that's what you're implying," replies Bella, shrugging rather carelessly now.

Esme decides to make an entrance here; a tray containing lemonade and cookies is placed on the desk. Bella at once reverts to her former state of shy incoherency.

"Thanks," she mumbles in reply to Esme's gentle "I thought you two might be hungry". He leans forward eagerly, a delightful new field of scientific speculation opening before his eyes: is her species capable of digesting human sustenance?

A cookie dangles listlessly from her fingers; she's inspecting it with some interest, her eyes quietly musing. He wonders if she's preparing an excuse for why she can't eat it.

Involuntarily, his fingers twitch toward the closed marble notebook lying just far enough away.

"Your mother is lovely," she says, with all appearances of sincerity. He shrugs. Of course Esme's lovely. He's come to know it as an integral part of her composition.

"She is. Do you have a prejudice against cookies baked by lovely people?"

She starts, clearly having forgotten all about the dessert still held between her fingers.

"Oh—no, I was just thinking."

She lifts it to her lips. He leans forward in what he hopes is an imperceptible manner, his fingers digging into the wood of the desk. Discovery, the elusive minx, is so tantalizingly close.

Bella bites neatly into it, chewing with a rather contemplative expression on her face.

He watches each movement of her jaw closely, eyes peeled—to use a vulgar and, to his mind, pointless turn of phrase—for the slightest hint of faking it…

She swallows. It's genuine; the light bobs on her throat. Inwardly he blesses Esme for having provided such a golden opportunity…

"May I ask whether you have a throat fetish or do you simply always stare at people like that?'

He jerks out of his feverish musings, dismayed to find that his face is hot as he scrambles for a logical explanation.

"Er…"

Her eyebrows lift; she stares at him with a mixture of wariness and amusement.

"Throat fetish," he says—and immediately wishes he hadn't.

This is hardly the way to keep a pupil who might pave his way to eternal, scientific glory.

But she laughs, fearless alien, perhaps secure in the knowledge of her own biological superiority—assuming, of course, that her species is biologically superior—and smiles as she flips through the trig book.

"I suspected as much. Vampire?"

"Virgin."

A vague hypothesis begins to form in his mind that these Beings have the ability to totally unhinge the tongues of attractive, logical teenage boys.

"Ah. A true creature of the night," she counters glibly, stopping at last on a page quite in the middle of the text. "And I don't understand this at _all_."

He bends over it accordingly, happy to oblige. There is something comforting to him about trigonometry, something in the simple formulas, the taking of one piece of the puzzle and using it to reveal the  
others…

Trigonometry, to him, smacks of science, and he does it often when he needs a distraction, something to pass the time. It's constant and logical, and this comforts him.

So little in life is.

* * *

The hour passes quickly enough. The moment she leaves, he closes his bedroom door and reaches for his notebook. When Esme announces dinner, he closes his ears to the thunder of Emmett galloping down the stairs. The brief, tasteful chime of the doorbell is certainly no incentive to hurry; it's most probably Rosalie, coming for dinner unannounced because Emmett forgot to tell Esme.

Again.

Sure enough, there's Carlisle's light, amused voice murmuring "Hello there, Rosalie" and Esme's soft, flurried "Rosalie, love, come in, so nice to see you, how are your parents?" and he's certainly not going down now.

There's something about the way Emmett looks at her which makes him feel terribly lonely.

_It would appear that the Beings have managed to simulate human responses and emotions remarkably well; embarrassment and laughter are both exceedingly authentic. Whether the anatomy undergoes the actual chemical changes (rush of blood to cheeks in a blush, etc) has yet to be determined. _

_On a similar note, the reason for this particular specimen's placement on Earth is also pending. _

_NOTE: Find extent of background story next time she comes. Ascertain parentage, coax out a few childhood memories, etc._

"Edward! Edward, come out and join us for dinner! Rosalie's here!"

He sighs, closing the cover and setting down his neatest, sharpest, blackest pen—he has abhorred gel pens for as long as he can recall—as he makes his way down the hall and into the dining room.

Per usual, the table is simply but neatly set. Carlisle is speaking in his warm, engaged manner to Rosalie while Alice chatters blithely to Emmett. Esme smiles at him from her place. There's another, slightly less troublesome favor in her eyes.

_Be nice_.

Again, he sighs, resigning himself to the tedious task of politely and genially interacting with his brother's rather boorish girlfriend.

"Hello, Rose," he says, sliding reluctantly into his seat—which happens to be the one next to her. She looks at him with those deep blue eyes which shouldn't be glacial—but are, alas for him—and her mouth moves, distorts into something of a pleasant smile.

"Oh. Hi, Edward. Heard you're a tutor now."

He nods. Rosalie makes him vaguely uncomfortable.

"What are you teaching?"

"Trigonometry."

Her eyebrows are disdainful as they climb up her forehead; he rather feels she's thinking that _God, Emmett has a nerdy brother_.

He usually doesn't really bother about things like that. But seeing as it's Rosalie, he cares even less. He continues eating.

"Who are you tutoring?"

He has a desperate, mischievous moment where he wants to say, quite coolly, "An alien from another world masquerading as an average human female"—but somehow he senses that Rosalie's scientific sensibilities aren't so well-honed as to appreciate this opportunity, so he takes a bite and replies:

"Isabella Swan."

"Oh, the new girl," says Rosalie, with a rather haughty shrug of her exceptionally nice—he _can _be objective when he wishes—shoulders. "The town's talking about her. I heard she's very—reserved. A little strange. Have you cracked her shell? Spilled her secrets?"

There's a light, derisive note to her voice which he's come to see as almost omnipresent; Rosalie gives the impression of looking at the world from an infinitely superior vantage point. Despite this, however, he wonders if perhaps she's reserved so as to more effectively keep her cover. The less said, the better, after all. One verbal slip—one vaguely unearthly phrase or movement—and the jig, as they say, is up.

"Not yet," he says—but his mind flits up to his notebook with all those lined, empty pages, and he resolves that he will.

_AN: Hello! Hope you enjoyed! Will update again ASAP-reviews are really motivating, by the way. Really. It would make my day._


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